Mr. Speaker, my colleague, the hon. member for Verchères, is absolutely right. This reminded me of what my Reform Party colleague said earlier about high prices.
I went shopping with my wife on Friday evening and I saw Prince Edward Island potatoes at a price which was exceptionally high for the season. Three years ago, there was an oversupply of potatoes in New Brunswick. The Canadian and New Brunswick governments of the time bought the potatoes to bury them in an open dump. On the CBC news, they showed us hundreds and hundreds of thousands of tons of potatoes being bulldozed
into a hole while we could have fed the starving people of the world with those vegetables.
To support the price of potatoes, our two governments had bought the farmers' production. They deliberately kept the potatoes from being marketed precisely to create scarcity. Sometimes we talk about environmental protection. Well it is certainly not very clever to bury potatoes, and not even make compost, when you think there are millions of people, tens of millions of people who cannot even eat a meal a day. And here, in New Brunswick, three years ago, we buried hundreds and hundreds of thousands of tons of potatoes.
When we talked about supply management, do you not think that a supply management system for potatoes would have been much better? Of course in Quebec, we could produce 25 per cent more milk if we wanted to. But why produce 25 per cent more milk if you cannot sell it?
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